Sustainable Society: A society that balances the environment, other life forms,
and human interactions over an indefinite time period.

Doomslayer

Wired MagazineOctober 1996

[excerpts]

. . . The battle lines now drawn, it was not long before
Ehrlich and Simon met for a duel in the sun. The face-off occurred in the pages
of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money
where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich's published claim that "If I were a
gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000"
―a proposition Simon regarded as too
silly to bother with― Simon countered
with "a public offer to stake US$10,000 ... on my belief that the cost of
non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise
in the long run."

You could name your own terms: select any raw material you
wanted ―copper, tin, whatever―
and select any date in the future, "any date more than a year away," and Simon
would bet that the commodity's price on that date would be lower than what it
was at the time of the wager.

"How about it, doomsayers and catastrophists? First come,
first served."

In California, Paul Ehrlich stepped right up
―and why
not? He'd been repeating the Malthusian argument for years; he was sure that
things were running out, that resources were getting scarcer
―"nearing depletion," as he'd said―
and therefore would have to become more expensive. A public wager would be the
chance to demonstrate the shrewdness of his forecasts, draw attention to the
catastrophic state of the world situation, and, not least, force this Julian
Simon character to eat his words.

So he jumped at the chance: "I and my colleagues, John P.
Holdren (University of California, Berkeley) and John Harte (Lawrence Berkeley
Laboratory), jointly accept Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people
jump in."

Ehrlich and his colleagues picked five metals that they
thought would undergo big price rises: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and
tungsten.

Then, on paper, they bought $200 worth of each, for a total
bet of $1,000, using the prices on September 29, 1980, as an index. They
designated September 29, 1990, 10 years hence, as the payoff date. If the inflation-adjusted prices of the various metals rose in the interim, Simon would
pay Ehrlich the combined difference; if the prices fell, Ehrlich et alia
would pay Simon.

Then they sat back and waited.

Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more
than 800 million, the largest increase in one decade in all of history. But by
September 1990, without a single exception, the price of each of Ehrlich's
selected metals had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor.
Chrome, which had sold for $3.90 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.70 in 1990.
Tin, which was $8.72 a pound in 1980, was down to $3.88 a decade later.

Which is how it came to
pass that in October 1990, Paul Ehrlich mailed Julian Simon a check for $576.07
. .

. .

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